‘We have boosted the health of Iron Bear, the Digi-Clone, and the pets to make them more viable’
FL4K has been spared the wrath of anotherBorderlands 3patch. All is right with the world.
As players try their best to create instant boss nuke builds and Gearbox tries to snuff those out, the battle for balance continues. Many legendary weapons were buffed across the board in a new patch deployed today, but the main points of contention are the Butcher and Lyuda weapons, very popular endgame weapons that were both nerfed fairly heavily. Hunter-Seeker, Hex and Firestorm grenade damage were also hit with the nerf bat.
The reason the aforementioned gun nerfs are so contentious is because Gearbox has been playing a dangerous game with endgame balancing, nerfing weapons after they become well-worn and grinded for. Some players are getting frustrated by the practice of grinding out a new cool gun in a game known for emphasizing that very concept, then having the rug pulled out from under them. Given thatBorderlands 3has no PVP element of any kind, some of the nerfs are puzzling.
And for the good news: Gearbox opted to improve the health value of the Iron Bear, Digi-Clone, and all pets by 50-100%. Speaking as someone who primarily plays pet-based classes inBorderlands 3, this is a pretty nice change. In a game as wild and crazy asBorderlands 3, that’s only a good thing.Just like the last patch, FL4K is safe: this has been your weekly episode of “FL4K Watch.”
Tediore
Vladof
The Lyuda’s functionality is to split the projectile from 1 to 3 after a certain distance. It was reported that the original projectile was never destroyed in the process of splitting so 1 projectile actually became 4. Addressing this concern effectively removed a full shot’s worth of damage which auto-corrects the base damage of the weapon. Since we increased all sniper rifle critical damage bonus in a previous hotfix, we reduced some of the critical damage bonus on the Lyuda.
Torgue
Flakker was greatly outperforming other shotguns due to the number of projectiles and the high rate of fire. We initially believed the resulting projectile spread would cause most of the explosions to miss the target, however this turned out to be false, so we reduced the projectile damage and allowed the weapon to only fire once per magazine. This change encourages players to capitalize on different stat bonuses to maximize the weapon’s damage output.
Jakobs
Hyperion
We found that a couple of the Legendary Hyperion weaponry bypassed the Hyperion manufacturer playstyle too easily making their bonuses greatly outweigh the penalties. The Butcher was drastically outperforming all metrics and we chose to reduce the damage to keep the fast fire rate.
Children of the Vault
Atlas
Grenades
Hex and Firestorm were calibrated to the wrong grenade modifier. These two grenades were envisioned to specialize by applying elemental DoTs to targets. Instead they were resulting in large amounts of damage and the elemental DoTs were minimal. We realize this is a drastic change on both of these grenades, but we did not want to remove the spectacle of the grenade (number of grenades spawned, number of targets hit, etc.) and focused on allowing their core identity to be emphasized instead of them continuing to just be high damage grenades.
Artifacts
It was reported that the Legendary artifact, Elemental Projector, had a bug resulting in the max value being displayed at 183% instead of the actual max value of 113%. Therefore,we addressed the discrepancy and reduced the max value to 90%.
Vault Hunter Adjustments
The current state of Moze’s Iron Bear, Zane’s Digi-Clone, and FL4K’s pets have made players focus on other elements besides those Vault Hunter’s fundamental action skills in the late game. While longer term solutions to scaling their damage is explored, we have boosted the health of Iron Bear, the Digi-Clone, and the pets to make them more viable. We will have more to say about long term solutions for these characters in the future.
